Social media today has facilitated the threat of disinformation. Anyone can say almost anything on sites like Twitter, and we have seen over the years the drastic consequences that can occur, with a key moment being the Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. With Twitter now pulling out of a key voluntary rulebook, EU officials are now threatening to ban the social media platform from the continent.
Under the leadership of Elon Musk, Twitter has withdrawn from a voluntary guidebook dictating rules and code of conduct for large tech firms which also includes companies like Meta, Alphabet, and Microsoft. This agreement acts to stop of the rise of disinformation online which has been weaponized in many cases.
In 2016 there was the much-discussed Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election, where it was discovered that fabricated materials and articles were spread through social media to benefit Donald Trump and discredit Hilary Clinton. It wasn’t even the start of it with Russia also found to have interfered in the United Kingdom’s Brexit referendum as well. It doesn’t even need to be as insidious as this, with anyone seemingly able to write anything and state it as fact without any checks or oversight and then place it on social media for anyone to click on and read.
That is the reason why The 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation was created in the EU, as a way of attempting to combat the rise of disinformation, with the French Digital Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, stating on France Info,
“Disinformation is one of the gravest threats weighing on our democracies. Twitter, if it repeatedly doesn’t follow our rules, will be banned from the EU.”
As of right now, this Code of Practice has not been mandatory but is a way to ease companies into the mandatory Digital Services Act that will go into effect in August across the EU. If Twitter cannot comply with these rules, then the EU will have no choice but to ban it. EU industry chief Thierry Breton posted this on Twitter,
Musk’s reasoning for buying Twitter was to make the platform more egalitarian when it comes to freedom of speech, however with mass layoffs reducing those sifting through harmful content and the dissolution of the Trust and Safety Council Twitter has struggled with a rise in hate speech according to The New York Times.
One way the tech mogul has attempted to combat disinformation is through his Community Notes, which allows select Twitter users to give particular tweets more context. This is in an attempt to show other users which tweets may provide factual or incorrect information. As of right now, Musk has not made a comment on the threat from the EU.
